"Great work by the SpaceX team!!!" SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on X after the flight.
Amazing accomplishment. Always a thrill to watch live.
SpaceX conducted 134 launches in 2024 and is targeting a record-breaking 160-170 orbital launches in 2025.
Frankly, it kind of blows my mind what the US pulled off in the late 60's, early 70's with the technology and materials of the time.
It's way harder to do it the first time.
Manufacturing the Apollo Guidance Computer (which wasn't in the rocket per-se, but was wired up to it and could fly the rocket in certain scenarios) alone consumed around 40% of the US' entire IC production capacity at the time.
raptor engines are designed to be cost efficient, as is the rolled steel? that is used for the fuselage
As with any manufactured item, high volume and iterative design improves the production process and finished product.
Also, SpaceX is not building rockets, they are building a rocket factory. If they succeed they will have lowered the cost of putting stuff into space by an order of magnitude. The potential rewards are huge.
Starship has considerably fewer moving parts. And googling 'evolution of raptor engines' gives you some pretty stark images on how simpler things look, in principle.
That said, I hadn't fully appreciated the size of Saturn V either until I saw it in person in the museum. Like, I had felt it was big, but it was big.
I got tingles when the first booster landed on the drone ship, because I knew access to space had just changed in a fundamental way.
First, the time frames are way off. Development of the Falcon 9 took ~5 years (2005 to 2010). The first reused booster came much later (2017?).
Second, Starship is much more expensive for each launch attempt than Falcon 9 ever was.
Third, Starship is significantly more complicated technology-wise, being methane based. There are reasons to do this but it then requires cooling both propellants (instead of just liquid oxygen and RP-1 ie kerosene with the Falcon 9(.
Fourth, Starship has to compete with somethingg Falcon 9 never did: Falcon 9. Falcon 9 is now the most succcessful and cheapest launch platform in history. It is the reliable workhorse of the industry and relatively cheap to launch. Its reuse is proven.
Fifth, the market for Starship is unproven. We can compare it to other launch systems for heavy payloads, most notably the Falcon Heavy, which I believe has only had ~12 launches in almost a decade (compared to the 100+ Falcon 9 launches every year).
You could argue SpaceX will steer customers to Starship but there'll be other competitors (to the Falcon 9) by then.
Lastly, Starship is still so far from being human-rated. So much of the needed tech (eg refuelling in orbit) hasn't even begun testing yet. I can easily see this taking another decade at least.
The launch cost of a Starship today is high, especially if you include development costs, but Musk's goal is a marginal launch cost of ~$1M. A Falcon 9's launch price is ~$70M; Musk claims a "best case" marginal Falcon 9 launch costs ~$15M.
They are already reusing boosters, so it might already be cheaper than F9 before booster reuse. Once they start reusing the ships, it will be cheaper than F9 with booster reuse because F9 has to build a new second stage each launch.
> Fifth, the market for Starship is unproven
The market for Starship is proven by SpaceX itself. The Starship can add 20x the Starlink network capacity per launch as F9. There are currently around 100 Starlink launches per year, so the market couldn't be more proven.
https://www.spacex.com/launches
It’s a bunch of starlink missions. With some dedicated and rideshare missions.
Nailing it would be without the things above.
I'm surprised they didn't take less risks just to avoid a narrative of failure.
It's privately own, might as well learn as much as possible with each dollar spent.
That's the advantage of being privately owned. "Vibes" (hah) don't matter. Public opinion doesn't matter. What matters is executing on your vision / goals. And they're doing that.
The fact that they're bringing in loads of cash from Starlink surely helps. They haven't had the need to raise money in a while, now.
There's a lot more eyes on them now a days, and Musk is much more well known, so it creates a lot more drama - but they've done the exact same process with everything. They even published a montage of failures [1] on the way to their first successful landing 'back in the day.' It was fiery, but mostly peaceful. They didn't even hit a shark!
The biggest can't-miss milestone was the flawless engine restart. That gives them the go-ahead to hit orbit on the next flight.
And fornlong duration missions also lubricant evaporation, possibility of vacuum welding & atomic oxygen reactions if you spend long in low Earth orbit. :)
Reminds me of early Google DIY rack PCs. [1]
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/1lf6yat/googles_fir...
If you can spare the weight and it meets your specs and the use it close enough you'd be a fool not to use it.
They are built to tolerate that, resulting in much better launch volume and weight utilization (sats are stacked on top of each other & held in place by rods that are then released).
The Starship Starlink release demo was quite tame in comparison to that. ;-)
Is it really unexpected that an extremely hot metal pressure tank will rupture when plunged into water?
Since the ship is designed to be caught by a tower and not be plunged into water at all, it doesn't seem like this would be an issue in normal operations.
They specifically said they're testing lighter fins to see how much they would hold. Let's not invent problems when it's an experiment that was clearly stated.
In SRE, we have chaos engineering so I'm wondering if it's the same concept.
They planned a test that would subject various components to stress levels outside of the normal mission profile. The various specific failures that resulted from that may be within expectations but not necessarily planned.
In engineering you want to know that a design will not just succeed at its rated limit, but have some margin percentage of safety above that. To measure that margin often involves destructive tests.
SpaceX's development methods differ a bit from more traditional rocket development by performing some of these potentially destructive tests with full-scale articles in real flight scenarios as part of an iterative process.
It's a different apporach to say the Apollo program, where they did heavy up-front analysis, at the expense of cost-efficiency, speed, and innovation. They had one-shot for a flight, otherwise that's several $bn up in flames.
Even with the last few mishaps, it's an approach that seems to be working. If you look at Starship and Falcon's journey in comparison to SLS and Blue Origin, they have done so much in such a short timespan.
They'll need a higher bar for Artemis but frankly Starship is not the only critical bottleneck there and it's not SpaceX's main financial driver.
To the contrary, I am fascinated by what SpaceX has accomplished so far. I wouldn't just say they "nailed it" they completely blew past all expectations I had.
"Why didn't just get it right on their first test", really? People can't even get a regex right the first time.
Are you aware of the size of this rocket? That it reached orbit? That it hovered over the ocean instead of just crashing into it? That it came back into a point with such precision that a buoy with a camera was already waiting for it? From orbit (that its 30,000km/h and 150km high)?
Your comment is just ridiculous.
The comment you replied to didn't say that. And this isn't the first test.
I think their comment was reasonable. It was a successful mission that met the stated objectives and demonstrated progress. But it wasn't perfect, and there is definitely more progress to be made for Starship to be a reliable operational launch system.
I was very surprised that that flap still held up during the stress testing on atmospheric re-entry.
Now that they're demoed pez-dispensing v3 dummy Starlinks, I'd assume they'll start launching real ones within ~1-3 months. At that point as long as they can deliver payload to orbit and catch the booster the program is operational and they'll start switching their own Falcon 9 launches over.
The HLS timeline is definitely dicey, but whether Starship winds up being the blocker remains to be seen. Otherwise they've now succeeded enough to "lean launch" Starship with equal/better capabilities to any other existing orbital rocket, and Starlink can fund indefinite further tests/iterations on the rest of their roadmap features (which no one else has).
I think it's still a bit early for that given that they've only had one successful flight and are still testing lots of new design changes, but I think you're right that the capabilities they've already demonstrated are probably enough to make Starship commercially viable even if literally none of the other revolutionary improvements they're working on pan out.
Falcon 9 doesn't recover the 2nd stage at all, and it's already by far the least expensive rocket out there in terms of cost/kg.
One option is they can run it again with the data gained from missing tiles etc. and see if there is an improvement.
They could also do a similar flight but with an actual orbital insertion and de-orbit if they are confident in the odds of success of the de-orbit burn.
Landing the ship at the launch site means overflying land and potentially populated areas, so I think they're going to want to demonstrate successful control, re-entry, and landing from orbit a few times before attempting that.
But I agree with you, I'd rather have test flight 11 demonstrate at least another successful reentry with no issues (they had a non-fatal explosion on ship reentry in flight 10) before attempting to catch the booster AND landing the ship.
I know it seems counterintuitive to everyone who grew up in the era of the space shuttle, but the ship is the cheap part, the giant booster is the expensive part.
The ship has a way longer cycle time so starship unit costs are going to dominate fleet construction cost despite being the cheaper unit so knowing exactly how hard you can run them is very valuable information it's worth gleaning by wasting some units early on.
I expect them to start catching the booster more often tho.
One interesting point is if they actually go for orbit. It would take just a few more seconds to reach something like 200+km / 100km, a place where they could deploy some v3 Starlinks and gather data from the launch (i.e. vibrations, health, dinging on the door, etc). It would be a test where they get more data that's transferable to the new architecture, and relatively low risk of getting stuck in orbit. (low perigee would mean eventual re-entry anyway, hopefully over the ocean) The sats can probably raise themselves from there.
I think as a culture we've lost the ability to compartmentalize. We should be able to criticize and even despise the head of a company, and at the same time celebrate when the intelligence and hard work of the countless smart and hard-working people at that company push the boundaries of what is possible for humanity.
On the one hand I am a major space nerd and I see the value of what SpaceX is doing. Especially with it really seeming like no one is anywhere near their level. What kind of scientific advancements will be possible once this thing can be used normally and launches like this become commonplace.
But at the same time it is impossible to ignore the Elon situation. And that also directly relates to Trump as well. We are in this bonkers situation where he helped get a largely anti-science administration in power and yet also runs one of the companies that will help science.
It does raise serious questions about whether or not there will be limitations on what types of science can be done. Will they have some line in the sand and say they won't launch satellites that do "X", like maybe monitor climate change.
I think maybe rooting for them to fail is a bit much, but I am sure as hell hoping that someone else can catch up. But in the mean time I will celebrate these achievements cautiously. Recognizing the amazing work that the engineers at SpaceX have put into this, because they do deserve a lot of credit for that.
My point with stating it, is it is not unreasonable to ask the question if we are reliant on a company with someone like Elon owning it is what the company will and will not fly going to be dependent on politics.
What if he’s not an idiot?
What if we should actually be listening to what this guy says and considering it?
What if he has the same ability to see what nobody else can see early on in politics…
As he’s shown across the rest of his career?
Are you the richest man in the world? If not, could it be that what is good for the person in that position is not good for you or most other people?
The "accomplishments" you're listing are mostly just investments that he managed to hype up very well. I'll give him this, he's an excellent huckster. But listen to his opinions? I wouldn't let him tell me what color an orange was.
Lets evaluate that claim, by first defining what an idiot is, and then looking at his history, all the things he said, and all the things he has done.
Ill skip you the trouble of going through that process - he is very much an idiot.
Don't confuse the ability to throw money at something and make it work through sheer cash burn with actual intelligence.
For example: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F1...
This statement alone disqualifies him to talk about anything self driving.
https://x.com/niccruzpatane/status/1960865882240115052?s=46&...
>Extra sensors add cost to the system, and more importantly complexity. They make the software task harder, and increase the cost of all the data pipelines. They add risk and complexity to the supply chain and manufacturing.
Yeah if you treat them like inputs to neural network and train on them. But you don't actually have to. Its like nobody bothered to open a book and read about Kalman filtering.
Meanwhile, they literally have guys that are data labelers and marking what a cone is in images. Sure seems efficient.
> Vision is necessary to the task (which almost all agree on) and it should also be sufficient as well.
Of course, except nobody in the space actually knows how to do vision self driving correctly. Hint - humans drive well not because of vision, but because we map vision to a 3d representation of the world on which we can run simulations on and figure out optimal path. The reason why we don't care what the obstacle on the road is for us not to drive over it is because we intrinsically understand the space that that object takes up and compute that a physical collision will occur which is bad.
So are never going to make self driving work with forward only passes from images to trajectory planning, unless you have a massive model running on 4 5090s in the cars that has seen so much data that it has most all scenarios built in.
>Sensors change as parts change or become available and unavailable. They must be maintained and software adapted to these changes.
Lmao what a pathetic statement. If you change out a lidar sensor and actually have anything that resembles sensor fusion it will still be way better than without. All you have to maintain is the little itty bitty piece of code that takes that sensor data and maps it to 3d space - all your existing sensor fusing software will just treat it as another input and use its contribution to generate a more accurate picture.
Im starting to think that these guys really just have no fucking idea how to do anything except run Pytorch.
Meanwhile, Waymo that is using lidar+cameras, winning market share, and is safer and more reliable.
> Having a fleet gathering more data is more important than having more sensors.
In theory, this is true. In practice, if you were to actually try to do forward only self driving, you need a compete set of data that represents crashes, and the thing is, not enough people crash irl. It really bothers me how all these figures in the self driving space obviously know what overfitting is (or maybe they don't lol), but fail to recognize that they are doing just that.
>Having to process LIDAR and radar produces a lot of bloat in the code and data pipelines.
Same as point one, and a stupid one. Sensor fusion with statistical methods like Kalman filtering is nothing new. You integrate the sensors, and even if they are off by a bit, the kalman filtering will take care of any noise or bias. Its been proven so many times over in literature in control theory, but yet these assholes think they are smarter than everyone because they do ML. Lol.
>Andrej predicts other companies will also drop these sensors in time.
At this point, given how Tesla self driving is doing after having a headstart on everyone, Id probably say that you are pretty dumb if you think he knows the space.
>Mapping the world and keeping it up to date is much too expensive.
How is it expensive when you can literally do the same thing Tesla is doing and just gather data from activity. The amount of changes of actual roads is going to be incredibly small. The point of the map isn't to plan routes assuming the map corresponds to reality, its to increase the accuracy because that map "sensor" also goes into sensor fusion.
There is a reason Karpathy left Tesla btw. He wanted to get out because he saw that the current way of doing things were never gonna work. You can't do vision only self driving with forward only neural nets, this should be obvious to anyone in the space right now. If Tesla had even a slight chance of winning, he would have stayed.
Of course he is a very positive spirited person that is never going to shit on his ex boss, and cause stock price to drop, so he is gonna come in and do these interview with Putins puppet, talk tech, and peace out to do his thing.
No go ahead and flag this comment because all of this is probably above your head and I have no idea what Im talking about, OBVIOUSLY.
Please tell us which culture war topics he’s anti-science on.
As far as Trump (and the administration in general) being anti-science. I really don't think I need to list examples of this.
- Deletion of economic databases.
- Deletion of public health information and historical weather databases.
- Criticism of vaccine effectivness
- Defunding of health and climate research funds.
- Leaving the largest international research alliances in Climate and Health.
- Defunding of NASA
He called the administration anti-science, which is well grounded claim. But no part of the phrasing implies that "republicans" are anti science or that you are.
Thanks to the intelligence and hard work of the countless smart and hard-working people he pushed the boundaries of what is possible for humanity.
Still, I find it hard to accept we should compartmentalize and not think about who those rockets were built for and with what purpose.
Yet that is exactly what the US did and we got the Saturn V out of doing so.
For me what this shows that the most important thing for a CEO to be successful is to have money, a vison (no matter how unrealistic or unnecessary) and a cult personality. Nothing else matters. Also it shows that with enough virtual money (I.e.: massively overblown Tesla stock) you can do just about anything.
Jeff loves measurement and control. So he replaced his experienced aerospace guy with the Alexa guy. Because the Alexa guy works the Amazon way: everything measured and tightly controlled.
It's clear that money isn't the defining factor at least. When BO was founded Bezos was the richest man in the world. It has floundered for so long that Musk was able to build up a cult of personality around SpaceX and parlay that into even more money than Bezos.
Will Starship every carry a large enough payload to justify the launch cost? I'm skeptical. Musk's Mars fixation is nuts.
This is not to condemn or argue with anyone who feels differently. But I think we need to be more visible.
If the government 100B to dig a big hole and fill it up again, that money would also "go back into those economies". Does that mean it wouldn't be wasteful?
That kind of testing is understandable to a certain extent. But it doesn't make sense to ditch the rocket in the Indian Ocean once you've run those experiments, instead of catching it, and having all the parts available to study.
> Mars rocket
Very dubious. If you disregard all the SpaceX marketting talk and just go by what they're building, then it's a rocket meant for launching very large satellite constellations as cheap as possible.
As for Mars, Starship might be ready for that in a few years (a year ago I was saying in a year or two, but I've kicked that back). But where are the Mars customers? Who is developing Mars habitation plans and hardware that will be ready in even twenty years? Commercial demand for large satellite constellations obviously exists. Demand for Mars colonization is nonexistent, it exists only in the hopes and dreams of sci-fi junkies.
I really hope I'm wrong, because I'm a sci-fi junkie!
After the Shuttle program ended in failure, work on reusable launch systems stopped for decades. A similar thing would happen if Starship fails. Space would remain the province of the military and large governments.
Today it costs ~$3,000 per kilogram to put something in orbit (on a SpaceX Falcon 9). Starship aims to lower that to $10 per kg. That's totally crazy, but even if it could get it down to $300 per kg, that would revolutionize access to space.
Data centers in space, biotech manufacturing, and maybe even asteroid mining and energy generation become practical at those prices. To say nothing of telecommunications, remote sensing, and global navigation--all become much cheaper.
And, of course, that drops the price on all the cool science/exploration goals that we always talk about: massive space telescopes, regular probes to all the planets, and crewed exploration.
We're literally at an inflexion point between two possible futures and we don't know which it's going to be. If I were younger I would absolutely try to work at SpaceX to help tilt the chances.
But as it is, all I can do is root for them.
Also, Kessler Syndrome is over-feared, like the China Syndrome from the nuclear age.
At Starlink orbits, space debris renters in years, if not months. And even then, having cheap access to orbit would allow us deploy replacements quickly.
At GEO, the distances are so vast that Kessler Syndrome is much less likely (though not impossible).
In between, there is some danger, but again, cheap access to orbit gives us the possibility of clean up.
Said fear was relevant.
Did it really stop for decades? I think SpaceX and Blue Origin were both already working on re-usable launch systems around that time
Remember also that when SpaceX started to develop Falcon booster reuse in 2011, every major aerospace company said that reusable vehicles would never make economic sense. Even after the first Falcon 9 recovery and re-flight, most aerospace companies thought reusability was a dead-end and that belief came from the refurbishment cost that Shuttle had to go through.
I count from 1994 (start of EELV) to 2021, when NASA launched astronauts on a reused booster and Peter Beck famously fulfilled his promise to eat his hat if Rocket Lab ever worked on a re-usable launch vehicle.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Space_Launch
I don't think Stoke's first vehicle will be large enough either (beyond proving out the technology). They will eventually need to build a much larger one.
Falcon 9 launches are already only ~10% government payloads, ~90% commercial payloads. They're already vastly not military/government launches.
I should have said that the space economy would remain small.
Government still props up this whole market.
I really don't agree with this take.
It may appear as if SpaceX is the only game in town, but in reality a lot of this technology is commoditized now, and space is as diversified and vibrant as ever.
The starting point today is very different from the post-Shuttle environment. If Starship fails, it is unlikely to be for pure technology reasons and something else will take its place with perhaps better product-market fit.
SpaceX is a symptom, not the cause.
The true dangers to all of these lofty human enterprises are geopolitics, domestic political destabilization and environmental collapse.
And if it fails, who will spend billions on a new vehicle?
Stoke Space: They are working on Nova, which is designed for 2nd-stage re-use, and they've got a novel architecture. But they are not well-funded and if Starship fails, it is likely that investor sentiment will shift away from full reusability (you know how investors are). And even if they succeed, their current vehicle can only get 3 tons to orbit. That means each launch must cost less than $1 million to get to the $300/kg target. In contrast, Starship can loft 100 tons, so it can cost up to $30 million per launch and still hit the target.
Blue Origin: They are still working on 1st stage re-use, and even assuming they get that to work next year, they are at least a decade away from testing 2nd stage re-use. And their current designs don't have any of the cost-savings in Starship (like launch-tower catch).
And that's it! There are no other companies seriously working on 2nd-stage reuse.
If Starship fails, there will not be another contender for cheap flights to orbit for decades.
There are a lot of other potential technological problems (dozens of engines, stainless steel construction, the belly flop maneuver, etc). Ultimately if Starship would were to fail for technical reasons, it would only indicate the particulars of Starship's implementation don't work. Starship is not the only (or even in my opinion the best) way to achieve full reusability. And partial reusability, which just a few years ago was considered radical, has already been so firmly proven that just about everyone is doing, or trying to do it. The idea of "don't destroy this extremely expensive vehicle after only a single use" won't die for as long as people can see expenses on their books.
If anything, the alternative approach, making a low cost, mass producible rocket has been abandoned, possibly pre-maturely.
Partial reusability won't get the cost down to the ~$100/kg range. And it definitely won't do that and still loft ~100 tons to orbit.
Falcon 9 can get 15 tons to LEO for $45 million, and that's already the lowest price on the market. To hit $300/kg they would need to build a 2nd-stage, launch, recover (on a drone-ship) and refurbish for $4.5 million. That's just not going to happen.
There are only two companies that are actively building hardware for 2nd-stage reusability: Blue Origin (which doesn't even have a prototype yet) and Stoke (which has a max 3-ton payload). If Starship fails, we are not getting $300/kg orbital costs for 1-2 decades minimum.
I agree that Starship has lots of other potential technological blockers (although fewer each attempt--I never thought tower-catch would work the first time). But no other designs are even close to fulfilling the promise of low-cost orbital launch.
I don't see why $100/kg is a particularly important threshold.
> Falcon 9 can get 15 tons to LEO for $45 million, and that's already the lowest price on the market. To hit $300/kg they would need to build a 2nd-stage, launch, recover (on a drone-ship) and refurbish for $4.5 million. That's just not going to happen.
Falcon 9 reusable is 20 tons to LEO, and the cost SpaceX charges is what customers are willing to pay, not their costs incurred. Before they had reusability, the cost to make a complete, expendable falcon 9 rocket was $50 million. The marginal launch cost for a falcon 9 was approximately ~$15 million in 2020 when they were doing 20% of the launches they're doing now. They are very likely already below $500/kg. Remember this is a system that wasn't initially designed with any level of reusability in mind. A more optimized design that shifted more of the cost to the booster and which was produced at the appropriate scale would almost certainly see a further lower cost.
Falcon 9 boosters can fly back to an onshore landing pad, and Starship has already demonstrated landing back on the launch tower itself.
> If Starship fails, we are not getting $300/kg orbital costs for 1-2 decades minimum.
That's a substantially shifted goalpost. Even if starship succeeds we're still probably more than a decade out from $300/kg orbital costs being a reality. Rockets take a long time to develop, and longer still to mature. SpaceX has been working on Starship for over a decade already. Of course if we assume every rocket currently under development gets cancelled and something new needs to be started from scratch, it will take at least one full rocket development cycle time to bear fruit. But OP was worried that if Starship fails it will cause a loss of faith such that no one even starts working on another attempt for decades.
Then everything that was not contributing to MOON ASAP was thrown away & massive spending on space hardware essentially normalized. The end result (Apollo) was impressive and achieved the goal (first on the Moon) - but was also totally unsustainable, resulting in a big crunch and a lot of setbacks and slowdowns.
Another contributing factor has been military involvement - again, wee need that milsat on orbit and we need it now, costs be damned. ICBMs not being exactly reusable does not help. Even the Space Shuttle design being perverted into its partially reusable clunky form can be traced back to military requirements.
I still think Shuttle could have worked, if it had been cheaper to evolve it.
Elon's focus on Starship is to make each iteration as cheap as possible, which means they can radically evolve the design without fear. Think of the (recent) switch to hot-staging or the evolution of Raptor.
If Shuttle had been able to evolve like that, I think they could have gotten the cost down. If you think about it, Starship is basically just Shuttle with the orbiter stacked on top of the booster and with propulsive landing.
I doubt it. It's a gigantic kludge that isn't fixable.
For example, the requirement that it land like an airplane meant it needed wings, landing gear, and a full set of flight control surfaces. None of that is useful apart from the landing, and yet it is necessary to push it all into space and re-enter it.
I once emailed Homer Hickam about it, and he was kind enough to reply and said he'd argued the same thing.
Stacking the orbiter on top of the external tank is a non-starter, IMHO. Obviously you'd have to add engines at the bottom, but now your cost goes up unless you plan on recovering the external tank (and how do you do that?).
And now you need another fuel tank for the orbiter, right? Do you extend the orbiter so it can fit an internal fuel tank? Or do you remove the engines and move them to a separate disposable stage?
Having to inspect each and every tile after every trip because they basically didn't work like initially designed was the primary failure of the Shuttle program. It also wasn't nearly safe enough, primarily due to a shitty management culture that was taking over America (and is still currently in power in nearly every business).
The thermal tile technology was for some reason believed to be dramatically easier to design, engineer, and manage than it ever came to be in reality. I'm not convinced that Starship has "solved" the problems inherent in tile systems.
It might be more accurate to say that the ratio of mass for re-entry equipment to the entire craft mass is too great.
But with that said I think that the ultimate failure of the shuttle was that the design wasn't amenable to low cost maintenance. A spacecraft could have a crappy payload to orbit as long as it's cheap to maintain and use with quick turnaround.
I have a feeling that should Starship succeed this will be the case with it and it will end up having a substantially lower payload than intended but will make up for it with a design that's cheap to build and maintain.
Really?
SpaceX conducts more than half the world's rocket launches and deploys 80% of the world's satellites.
https://brycetech.com/reports/report-documents/bryce-briefin...
Why? It's not because they somehow cheat by sending most of their mass in starlink satellites. It is the other way around -- their satellite comms business is only viable because of their advances in rocket technology: cost of mass to orbit has not really come down since the 50s, not until SpaceX which slashed it dramatically.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cost-space-launches-low-e...
The minimum propellant travel times are a major barrier.
Have there ever been any historical plans for a permanently-transiting interplanetary craft?
A large craft is built, accelerated up to speed (since time wouldn't be a factor, high Isp/low-thrust engines could be used), then left looping between Earth and X at constant high speed, with smaller (and shorter-term) craft accelerating to meet it (e.g. underway replenishment with crew and fuel transfer) or decelerating at the destination.
Heck, if you've got something optionally-crewed, you could have it continuously burning for years to build up speed.
Or do solar system astrodynamics make waiting and then burning like hell from orbital speeds during optimal transit windows more efficient?
https://buzzaldrin.com/space-vision/rocket_science/aldrin-ma...
https://web.archive.org/web/20101102073607if_/http://buzzald...
It is indeed more efficient to perform the usual Hohmann transfer, but the advantage of the Aldrin Cycler concept is you can accelerate a large vehicle once and then 'amortize' that over multiple trips.
Almost all the problems can be solved by cheaper access to space, whereas the benefits cannot be easily recreated on Earth.
Is it guaranteed to work? My point is that we don't know, despite confident assertions one way or the other. If it does work, the benefits are clear, and that's why it's worth trying.
My take: The idea that heavy computing in LEO is better than sending data down to Earth sounds very naive. Starlink is great proof that the bandwidth is plentiful and the latency is good, once the equipment is modern. Definitely cheaper and easier than cooling a datacenter.
"enabling the future of AI by deploying the largest training clusters on data centers in space."
Falcon 9 has massively brought down the cost per orbit, and even with the whole world as a captive market, every university in every country putting up cubesats, they still don't have nearly enough payloads to make the economies of scale kick in. Hence Starlink. The majority of SpaceX payload mass has been Starlink, something nobody was even asking for. 300+ launches.
And the idea to reach the economies of scale for Starship is... Even more Starlink. How much Starlink could we possibly need? When will humanity come up with another use for this glut of payload capacity?
Even with the Artemis deadline looming large, SpaceX are still pushing this Starlink angle for Starship, it's nuts
As for "How much Starlink could we possibly need?" I think the answer is simply "YES". Even when you possibly somehow satisfy all your Internet access customers, you can start adding other services, like mobile phone coms (already in progress) or maybe imaging or hosted payloads.
Even at $300/kg to LEO there are a ton of new applications that suddenly make sense. If we get to $10/kg we will literally colonize the solar system.
That's the vital strategic asset, because suddenly the US will have ASAT-tolerant space sensing capability (by virtue of decentralization and numbers) while other countries will still have exquisite assets.
Starlink is interesting, but the above is a game changer at the level of when the Key Holes were launched or the GPS constellation was completed.
I guess overall I don't understand your point. What does it matter that the majority of their payload mass was their own? And nobody asking for something is certainly not the same thing as nobody wanting/needing it. See: cars, computers... Starlink now exists and I'm quite certain people love it and rely on it. Wouldn't exist without falcon 9. Starlink basically solved the last mile problem, surely you'd agree rural folks having access to Internet is a good thing?
They made their own demand for falcon 9, with that scale bringing down costs enough to raise demand for basically every research org needing satellites to contract with SpaceX.
I don't think we can definitively predict the demand either way for payload at $300/kg or whatever without first getting there, but Jevons might have some ideas.
If Starship cuts cost to orbit by at minimum 1/3 and at maximum 1/100th demand will skyrocket (pun intended) either way.
Once there's a usable supply chain at the top of the gravity well (or on bodies with lower gravity), a lot of other launch demand is unlocked, because you can do truly interesting things (colonization et al).
You mean no other company except SpaceX has such a demand. But SpaceX does in fact have such a demand and are using it to make a profit.
Small governments don't understand that they can have space science programs rivaling NASA for super cheap. That's what's holding demand back imo.
“ended in failure” sounds harsh in this context. Or is that just me whistling past the sunk cost fallacies?
I watched the Martian again the other day and I marveled about how much has changed. With Starship progress, almost none of the plot really makes sense (bespoke vehicles and payloads etc). The first mars expeditions will probably be stocked with a thousand tons of gear, enough to easily last a guy 5 years. And if some dude were stranded on Mars, SpaceX could start lobbing things in his direction within maybe 30 days?
The Martian is a vision for a 2035 mission from 2011. We seem likely to beat that!
> The Martian is a vision for a 2035 mission from 2011. We seem likely to beat that!
What, exactly, is that guy doing for those five years? We don't know how to terraform Mars, and it's questionable what having someone on the surface will add to the knowledge we have of surface composition. And then what? That equipment is still on earth - after it's built.
Oh, and how's he planning to get off Mars?
I would comfortably make a $100 bet that there is no chance that we have sent a manned mission to even orbit Mars by 2035, let alone are "settling" it.
> The effect of this no-abort condition is to make Mars mission design acutely risk-averse.
"Acutely risk-averse" is not SpaceX.
And being acutely risk-averse also underscores my point. If we are actually acutely risk-averse, we aren't going from "still test-flighting and developing the launch vehicle" to "manned mission" in 9.5 years.
A major activity for the Martian would be exploring the location and prospecting for necessary raw materials, like digging for water.
Waiting to be rescued. We're not talking about sending one guy to mars for funsies, we're talking about one person left after an emergency. In the book he gets off mars by going to the launcher staged for the next mission, which again is a case of prepositioning extra hardware before sending someone to the planet.
If you assume a team of 5 people with an intended stay of 6 months, 5 years of supplies is a factor of safety of 2. If you send enough supplies to keep the whole team alive till the next launch window, that would keep a single person alive for about 2 decades (ignoring potential storage lifetimes).
There's a "world" of difference between the Eagle returning to Apollo 11 in low lunar orbit, and prepositioning a interplanetary vehicle capable of Mars-Earth (after getting from Earth to Mars), landing it (and without live feedback/guidance, because of roundtrip radio time, not to mention, this isn't some Rover, it's a really large rocket) well in advance of the manned mission (8 month flight time, IIRC, which means realistically it's going to be hanging out on Mars for a minimum of 6 years, even if you launch the manned mission within a couple of months of its arrival, which seems ... risky) and hoping that one solo astronaut is going to be capable of fixing any issues that arose during landing or during its ~year, untouched, and five years of his habitation.
Martian dust storms are a thing. "Smaller", continent-sized ones lasting weeks at a time, hit a few times a years. And then you have the planet-covering ones.
> Individual dust particles on Mars are very small and slightly electrostatic, so they stick to the surfaces they contact like Styrofoam packing peanuts.
So many issues. We're not solving these by 2035.
We are still at the point where unmanned, tiny craft with none of these challenges routinely fail. We're making progress, but we're not making that much progress, not that quickly.
If Earth and Mars are on opposite ends of the sun, nobody is going anywhere within 30 days. I do not see how anything will change from the one transfer window per ~2 years for the foreseeable future
In the limit, there are hyperbolic trajectories that would basically give you such wide launch windows that you could launch whenever, but you're not doing that with chemical rockets.
fluoridation•5mo ago
voidUpdate•5mo ago
fluoridation•5mo ago
anonymars•5mo ago
dylan604•5mo ago
fluoridation•5mo ago
dylan604•5mo ago
fluoridation•5mo ago
terminalshort•5mo ago
fluoridation•5mo ago
anonymars•5mo ago
Presumably what we're trying to get at is, in broad strokes, "is Starship more cost-effective to develop than Saturn V" (and I assume the follow-on for that will be to compare the "NASA approach" vs the "SpaceX approach")
But you raise a good point in that the baseline playing field is completely different. The existing knowledge each program started with, be it in materials science, understanding of rocket combustion, heat shield technology, electronics, simulation ability, you name it, it's completely different. So we can find and pull out whatever numbers, but I don't think it's possible for them to say anything meaningful for comparison on their own.
fluoridation•5mo ago
It depends on how different they are. Saturn V was launched 13 times in total. Starship is already 75% of the way there and hasn't orbited once. Ignoring R&D and just going by launch costs alone, that's USD 4B (2025) to orbit 1 Saturn V, vs USD x to orbit 1 Starship, where x >= 1B.
dylan604•5mo ago
Apollo 1 - lost on the launch pad, crew killed. very bad Apollo 13 - major malfunction causing loss of mission but crew saved. very not bad
Starship - 10 launches 5 failures. No crew ever so that pressure is also not comparable.
Are we really claiming Starship has achieved 75% of the results of Apollo? That's absolutely ludicrous
fluoridation•5mo ago
dylan604•5mo ago
Not one of these triumphant 75% achievement in launch numbers would have had a surviving human. Apollo had 0 practice runs. Starship is nothing but practice runs. To equate the number of launches to something so drastically different is just an exercise in futility that I can only assume you're trolling
fluoridation•5mo ago
anonymars•5mo ago
Read it as "Starship is already 75% of the way to that cost and hasn't orbited once" (you seem to be in agreement)
terminalshort•5mo ago
fluoridation•5mo ago
>It only launched 13 times due to being so expensive as to just not be feasible.
"There aren't many uses for such a gigantic rocket. Let's make an even bigger one and hope it works out!"
terminalshort•5mo ago
anonymars•5mo ago
Sparyjerry•5mo ago
fluoridation•5mo ago
Sparyjerry•5mo ago
fluoridation•5mo ago
LOL. Are you serious?
To reach orbit: to reach a horizontal speed such that the spacecraft can complete a revolution around the celestial object while in free fall, without having to execute any additional maneuvers.
Starship has yet to reach orbit. The reason doesn't matter. It hasn't done it.
Sparyjerry•5mo ago
thesmart•5mo ago
There are teams of incredible engineers working there because NASA paved the way.
terminalshort•5mo ago
ralfd•5mo ago
> Project cost US$6.417 billion (equivalent to $33.6 billion in 2023)
> Cost per launch US$185 million (equivalent to $969 million in 2023)
That a manned Apollo mission would/did cost under a billion dollars (todays money) is surprisingly cheap. A single Artemis launch using the Space Launch System (SLS) costs an eye watering $4 billions.
Different metric:
> [1966] NASA received its largest total budget of $4.5 billion, about 0.5 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States at that time.
Using that metric NASA yearly budget would with todays GDP be $150 billion dollars.
nashashmi•5mo ago
This represents less than 0.5% of the total U.S. federal budget, though it’s one of the most visible and impactful science agencies
voidUpdate•5mo ago
mikepurvis•5mo ago
That said, it would be interesting to have someone really knowledgeable go over what it is that Artemis has and Saturn V didn't, and then break them down and assign each an approximate proportion of the cost delta.
wat10000•5mo ago
SLS is also a pretty weird design due to reusing Shuttle components for a completely different kind of launcher. This saves development costs (maybe) by using existing stuff that has already been developed, but the unsuitability of those components for this system increases per-launch costs. Once NASA runs out of old Shuttle engines, manufacturing new ones is going to cost $100 million apiece if not more, and each launch needs four of them. It was OK for Shuttle engines to be expensive since they were supposed to be amortized over hundreds of flights (and in practice were actually amortized across at least tens of flights) but now they’re being used in expendable launches. If Starship even comes remotely close to its goals, an entire launch will cost less than a single SLS engine.
thesmart•5mo ago
jiggawatts•5mo ago
boxed•5mo ago
loeg•5mo ago
anonymars•5mo ago
fluoridation•5mo ago
anonymars•5mo ago
fluoridation•5mo ago
boxed•5mo ago
I guess you could argue that it's never meaningful to compare anything that isn't a commodity though, which certainly isn't the case here. But I find that silly.
anonymars•5mo ago
boxed•5mo ago
dragonwriter•5mo ago
staplung•5mo ago
Nobody but SpaceX knows how much each Starship test costs but the estimates online range from $50 million to $200 million. Presumably, whatever the actual cost, they're more expensive right now while they're redesigning bits and doing custom, one-off work for each flight but it has a long way to go to beat Saturn V for the full mission.
briandw•5mo ago
thesmart•5mo ago
boxed•5mo ago
thatoneguy•5mo ago
I bet it will get to the moon cheaper, too, and the Muskonauts will use less expensive lenses than Hasselblads to take photos.
fluoridation•5mo ago
The reason why it matters is that efficiency matters. It's fine if it takes longer, not so much if it costs way, way more, especially if such a huge rocket has limited applications. And as I understand it the consensus is that Starship (or at least a fully-loaded Starship) will never go to the Moon. Once it's in orbit it takes like twenty refueling launches and space rendezvous to fill it up again so it can make the transfer burn. In other words, it's never happening.
stetrain•5mo ago
Yes the mission profile is more complex, but that complexity can mostly be settled before the astronauts launch on their mission.
NASA seems to think it is a viable plan which is why they selected SpaceX to execute that part of the mission.
fluoridation•5mo ago
> After a multi-phase design effort, on April 16, 2021, NASA selected SpaceX to develop Starship HLS and deliver it to near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) prior to arrival of the crew for use on the Artemis III mission. The delivery requires that Starship HLS be refueled in Earth orbit before boosting to the NRHO, and this refueling requires a pre-positioned propellant depot in Earth orbit that is filled by multiple (at least 14) tanker flights.
I stand by what I said: not happening. I'll believe it when I see it.
Can you imagine if to make a sightseeing trip to another city you had to stop in the middle of the highway and then make 14 round-trips with a second car to fill your first car back up? I can't imagine why someone would approve this plan, other than corruption.
DarmokJalad1701•5mo ago
If the alternative was throwing away and building/buying a new car for every trip? Absolutely.
They said the same about landing a first stage booster - impossible and pointless to attempt. And it just happened for the 400th time yesterday.
fluoridation•5mo ago
stetrain•5mo ago
fluoridation•5mo ago
0xffff2•5mo ago
Powdering7082•5mo ago
From wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9#Pricing
dmbche•5mo ago
We didn't get to the moon with a refuelling station did we? How come we need one now? We're really seeing 15 starship launches per moon trip as reasonable, rather than just building a single trip program?
The mission itself is nonsensical. The problems are stemming from the SLS, I'll find a link to a relevant source.
stetrain•5mo ago
A single trip launch will always be constrained like this due to the tyranny of the rocket equation.
A modular mission system with multiple launches is the best way to expand capabilities and enable things like landing larger payloads for more advanced or long-term missions.
fluoridation•5mo ago
stetrain•5mo ago
fluoridation•5mo ago
1. Starship is never going to be usable for a Moon mission.
2. There's little scientific value in Moon missions.
3. There's never going to be long-term missions to the Moon.
I maintain all three simultaneously.
slipperydippery•5mo ago
One of many wacked-out things about the plan.
stetrain•5mo ago
Return payload constraints are probably from using Orion as the return vehicle. Mass to the surface is much higher than Apollo since that is launched separate from the crew.
slipperydippery•5mo ago
[EDIT] Apparently there are multiple plans involving even more spacecraft, because why not I guess? It's as you describe for Artemis III, but then gets way more complicated with Artemis IV, involving more spacecraft for some reason.
stetrain•5mo ago
NASA has optioned an additional lander from Blue Origin but that would be taking the same role as SpaceX's lander, shuttling from lunar orbit to the surface and back to lunar orbit.
DarmokJalad1701•5mo ago
No. We did it by throwing away ~98% of the vehicle on the way there.
> How come we need one now?
Because building a new gargantuan tower and tossing that majority of it into the ocean/deep space every time we need to go the moon is not sustainable.
> We're really seeing 15 starship launches per moon trip as reasonable, rather than just building a single trip program
Yes. Because again. The alternative (dictated by physics) is that we expend the whole thing.
dmbche•5mo ago
Making trips to the moon sustainable is pointless and nonsensical.
Edit0: good read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40410404
fluoridation•5mo ago
We can also, you know, not. We could put that money to something here on Earth instead of burning it up.
DarmokJalad1701•5mo ago
The technology developed for doing such a difficult task will inevitably benefit all of humanity. It did so for Apollo. It will again in the future.
https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/why-explore-space-...
fluoridation•5mo ago
If the idea was not clearly conveyed then let me try again: the money is spent building things that are intended to be destroyed (in order to fulfill their function, but nevertheless), when it could be spent building things that are intended to last.
>The technology developed for doing such a difficult task will inevitably benefit all of humanity.
I've heard this refrain several times. Please name a technology that was developed for the space program and that would have otherwise not been developed.
stetrain•5mo ago
It was pumped, shipped, refined, and trucked to that point using a complex supply chain, enabling your final trip to happen with one fuel transfer.
redox99•5mo ago
stetrain•5mo ago
And it's totally valid for you to have that opinion. But it's your opinion, not "the consensus."
slipperydippery•5mo ago
I'm with you. Not happening. We're more likely to come up with a totally different, simpler plan, and do that instead, before this happens.
stetrain•5mo ago
The fuel that is landed is used to get back from the lunar surface to lunar orbit, not to return to Earth. That fuel stays with Orion in NRHO.
ajmurmann•5mo ago
Taking longer at lower cost is a great trade-off for Starship but wasn't for Saturn V. The main driver for Saturn V was the space race against the Soviet Union. Economic interests played a very small role. It was all about being first and compensating for the Sputnik shock.
moralestapia•5mo ago
There is nothing wrong with this question. Zero.
Stop eroding this site's community.